The Finest Yorkshire Beef

In our menu planning we have been seeking to try new ingredients as well as new preparations, in order to take advantage of being elsewhere.  For that reason, we have so far stayed away from "chicken" and "beef," foods that are available at home in very high quality.  But on the other hand, we have access to some of the finest chicken and beef on the planet, or so our sources say.  So for Saturday, we opted for a T-bone steak from the Ginger Pig, sliced for us off a larger rack. (Don't try this at home - the butcher uses a bone saw.)  The Ginger Pig's beef (also served at London's top restaurants, including Hawksmoor) comes from their Yorkshire farm, and as their web site explains, come from the largest Longhorn herd in the country, England's oldest breed. The beef is then aged for about 35 days.

One of the reasons we had avoided steak is our lack of a grill; in the end we sauteed this on top of the stove, although we'd intended only to brown it and finish it in the oven, as instructed, we recall, by one of Paul Bocuse's recipes.  We completed the meal with garlic mashed potatoes (using Maris Piper potatoes), and Kenyan green beans from Waitrose: here is how they are packaged:

The beef has a tenderness and slight gaminess that is really outstanding.  We sauced the steak with a marchand du vin sauce, using shallots, red wine, fancy "Heston beef stock" from Waitrose.  Heston is a celebrity chef with whom we are not familiar, but like many, including the Prince of Wales and Jamie Oliver, he has his own line of quality foods at Waitrose.  And here is our dinner, along with a bottle of Vinsobres from the St John wine people.

Our midweek meal was a pair of brown trout from Waitrose, roasted on a bed of leeks and fennel. Pretty fine weekday meal!

Other eating adventures last week included chestnut flour pappardelle (from the fresh pasta people Latua at Borough Market) with a sauce of Italian sausage (Ginger Pig), carrots, fennel, onion, canned plum tomatoes and wine, a variation on a recipe from the River Cafe's first "Easy" cookbook.

This was a "quick" supper before going to an excellent concert of baroque music at St John, Smith Square.
On Wednesday, we were among the fortunate (and far-sighted) to have tickets for the hit opera of the season, "Anna Nicole," at the Royal Opera.  Everything Anthony Tommasini wrote in his New York Times review was true -- it was a moving, complex, exciting, and thoroughly thrilling opera,  even if many of the lyrics would have to be bleeped were it to be shown on US television (or opera stages).  We decided to dine afterwards at 32 Great Queen Street, just minutes away from the opera (and our flat).  For a late night supper we had starters of lamb's sweetbreads, and smoked mackerel, and we shared a main course of cold wild rabbit salad with raddichio and endive.  This place never disappoints!

Fishy Weekend

Elif Batuman, who gave a lecture Monday night at the British Museum on "Cervantes, Balzac, and Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel," has introduced a new concept into our everyday lives: that for novelists there is the time of writing, and the time of living.  You can't write unless you have lived; but while living, there is no time for writing.  We are discovering the same credits and debits in keeping track of our cooking adventures here: it is so much fun cooking and eating that we sometimes have no time for recording and writing.  So a previous weekend's meal of wild mallard duck (roasted; purchased at Marylebone Farmer's Market) and red kale; followed by lamb chump chops (also from a Marylebone stand), our own mint sauce, brussels sprouts in browned butter, and mashed potatoes, will not receive the full monty write up.  The photos are in the computer, though.

Instead, I will focus on our most recent forays into Simon Hopkinson's approach to fish.  (He of the cookbook Roast Chicken and other stories, and formerly of Bibendum restaurant, where we dined with Hannah on Saturday night during her visit here.)  Each of them introduced us to new or rare ingredients, which took us a while to seek out.

Saturday was smoked haddock baked with potatoes and cream.  Smoked haddock (also known as "smokie") is a staple of British cuisine. We chose an oak smoked filet from the Furness fish stall at Borough Market.

But now it must be skinned.

Then the skinned filet is poached in a mixture of mostly cream and a little milk for a few minutes.

Then the cooked smoked haddock is flaked, and we are ready to build our construction.  The baking dish is buttered, lined with a layer of sliced potatoes.  These are topped with some chopped parsley and some of the flaked haddock.

Next comes a layer of sliced fresh tomatoes (yes, these are out of season, but the greengrocery stall at the market imports from all over.)

Pour in the cream and milk mixture from the poaching casserole.

Then add another layer of potatoes, parsley, tomatoes, and fish, ending with a layer of potatoes.  Top the last layer with some grated nutmeg, using in a pinch the fine grating wheel from the Mouli mill.

Add some more milk to nearly cover, and then bake in the oven for a half hour or so until the potatoes are tender.  We are still trying to calibrate Hopkinson's baking times, which are perpetually underestimated.
While waiting, we had for an hors d'oeuvre some "beetroot and vodka cured" salmon from a fishmonger in Sheffield, where I'd visited the day before. Good with wine, best with Russkii Standart vodka!

Finally the meal is ready, and the final result was scrumptious, served with buttered brussels sprouts and Sancerre.  (Simon recommends this dish on a cold winter's day after a good movie.  We had the winter's day; the movie was "Black Swan"; the meal helped us recover.)

Sunday.
We've had our eye on Hopkinson's recipe for "Salmon in pastry with currants and ginger" since encountering stem ginger in Cambridge.  A trip through Google located frozen puff pastry at the local Planet Organic shop.
The recipe begins with rolling out the puff pastry to make squares.  If your kitchen doesn't have a rolling pin or a Regab bottle, you can use a wine bottle.

Meanwhile, we are also preparing the butter topping for the salmon, which consists of currants, salt and pepper, ground mace (we found "blade mace" at Waitrose), and slivered stem ginger.  This is knobs of ginger in syrup, and it took quite of bit of sleuthing to locate it even though we were told we could buy it at Waitrose.  Some people put it in jam.  Or bake chunks of rhubarb with this scattered over it (good in an Aga).

Here is how it looks in the process of being slivered.

This butter mixture, chilled and softened, is then smeared on the salmon filets and left to chill again.

The chilled pastry is now coated with egg yolk and water.  In the absence of a pastry brush, try a wine bottle cork.

The filets are placed on the pastry, butter side down.

Then they are wrapped, chilled again for about 30 minutes, then the crust is hatchmarked and egged.

The parcels are then finally baked in a 400 degree oven 20-30 minutes "until golden brown".  Serve with boiled new potatoes (seemed excessive) and watercress salad.  The solid butter melted into the salmon and the pastry, the baking time was just right, and everything was succulent and wonderful.

This was the time for eating, and there are no more photos!

Restaurant review of the week: for Monday night, we went to St John Restaurant, following the aforementioned Batuman lecture.  The fish on the menu (smokie, hake) looked good, but we opted for land animals, and had marrow bones and parsley salad, and brown crab toast for starters, and smoked Old Spot and veal pot roast for mains, splitting a dessert of blood orange sorbet with a riumka of vodka on the side.

Aga

Last weekend we were house guests in Cambridge, and among the many delights there -- good company and Boucle d'Or, Evensong at King's College, a walk at Wicken Fen, and being away from the Big Smoke -- was getting acquainted with an Aga stove and all that it could do.  This is a comparable model, from the Aga web site.

  The principle of the Aga is that is it always on (BTUs on demand).  The inventor was a serious physicist and had something to do with propane.  OK.  The heat in the Aga circulates throughout the stove: each of the four ovens pictured above is at a different temperature; the left hand burner on top is hot, the right hand is simmer (there is a warming plate on the left hand side.  There is a smaller version, for folks like those who built Falling Water in Pennsylvania, that omits a couple of ovens and the warming plate.)

The advice book for the Aga suggests that one would plan to do 80% of the cooking in the ovens, 20% on top.  To adjust the heat on top, you move your plan to be squarely on the burner, or perhaps off to the side.  The hot burner will boil water (in a special kettle) in a flash; toast your bread held between special grids.  The simmer burner will do sausage and eggs for an English breakfast (in sequence, not at the same time).  Another Aga secret is silicon pads: to fry eggs, for example, you put the pad on the burner, crack the eggs on the pad, and cover. Voila.  The ovens require special pans that fit on runners -- kind of like a lateral file.  Higher in each oven is warmer; lower is cooler. You warm plates, for example, in the coolest of the ovens.  You can do bacon for that English breakfast in one of the ovens.  You move around your roasted vegetables and roasted meats as necessary for the right cooking temperature.
It certainly dominates our no-name electric cooker in Bloomsbury!!
Of course, every pot or roasting rack absorbs heat, so if there is a lot going on in the Aga (say, pork belly in one of the ovens, roasted root vegetables in another, roasted whole shallots in a third, orange marmalade on top), the heat tends to diminish.  One can adjust the overall heat -- we were told that it takes 6-8 hours for the adjustment to become effective, kind of like turning an oil tanker.
The next question, of course: in what climates would such a cooker be appropriate, one that is always on and generating heat in the kitchen?  England!!  Or a colonial kitchen, in which the cooking is done in an open shed in the back garden.  Or Fallingwater, where the work of the weekend home is done far away from the ease of the weekend hosts and guests.  Somehow, it does not seem a great idea for your average central Illinois summer.  Walking into such a kitchen - the smell is spectacular. Pork belly, bacon, marmalade, ...

But in the right climate, it is the cook's equivalent of a manual transmission car, or writing your own code on the computer, in other words, of taking charge of your own heat source.  And it looks fabulous!!

Surf and Turf

On week nights we aren't always able to prepare such elaborate dishes, Hopkinson or no Hopkinson, but there are just so many excellent ingredients, especially seafood but also animals with hooves.   Last week we bought a lovely monkfish half from Applebee's Fish Market, a big bunch of mussels, and made a kind of cataplana with tomatoes, cream, and wine.  We served this with basmati rice, which requires a deft control of the stovetop, so we won't show you the final results.  The fish, though, was beautiful to start with and tasty at the end.

Instead of the cataplana, of course, we used the Le Creuset casserole to make the sauce in which we then steamed the mussels and fish.

And the final presentation, with the rice on the side:

We also returned to the scene of the pork chop, this time with a fat chop from the Ginger Pig, and did a much better job of sauteeing it and then finishing it off in the oven.   We served this with roasted butternut squash and pomegranate seeds, and a green salad.

Last weekend we were out of town, but did not leave before shopping at the Market, of course, for some Iberico ham to bring with us, and a couple of things for our return.  One was a pork pie, with black pudding, from Ginger Pig, which made a nice Sunday supper.

Another was a succulent veal chop, also from the Ginger P, which we prepared like the pork chop, saucing it with a little cream, and serving with fingerling potatoes and spinach cooked in brown butter.

A light Tuesday supper was a frisee salad with bacon (yep, Ginger Pig), croutons made from Poilane bread fried in olive oil, and some poached eggs.  (These very fresh eggs don't poach exactly like they do at home.  We are still working on this one.)

Eating out.  On a Wednesday, we went to a fascinating film, "The Portuguese Nun," and decided to try out Jamie's Italian restaurant in Covent Garden afterwards, around 9 pm.  They don't take reservations, and the place was packed, but we took a number and waited.  It was surprisingly good for a chain with a lot of hype.
Later in the week we went to a concert at Wigmore Hall and decided to eat at a fusion restaurant we'd heard a lot about, Providores, in Marylebone High Street.  Small plates, interesting combinations.  The downstairs Tapa bar (named after a Maori textile) was hopping - somewhat like Avec on a busy night. Upstairs was more sedate, but very pleasant after a great concert by Magdalena Kozena.
This same chef, Peter Gordon, has opened a new place in Covent Garden, just down the street from our favorite Monmouth coffee and up the street from the Coliseum, where we were to see the English National Opera's production of Lucrezia Borgia, music by Donizetti, production by the film director Mike Figgis (with film interludes included).   We had an early supper at Gordon's Kopapa, with a number of tapas-sized and really delicious dishes such as tuna tartar, eggplant tower, fried pimentos. More like Avec on an early night.  The desserts were also pretty terrific. We are going back for Saturday brunch!

Wabbit

At the end of January, we had a weekend of rabbit.  The food arranger has been falling behind on the work, so we don't have a step by step visual story of this rabbit.  At Borough Market's Wyndham Farm chickens, we purchased a pretty huge French farm-raised rabbit, which the butcher cut up for us, whack whack whack, giving us the head too.  Now what to do with this wabbit?  We have been relying on random recipes that we find on the web, but this time we thought we should get serious, and so we looked for cookbooks at our neighborhood book store, the London Review of Books Shop.  Here we found our beloved Roast Chicken and other stories, by Simon Hopkinson.  We have a copy at home, but it seemed the right investment for advice on English ingredients.
From Hopkinson, we were intrigued by a recipe for "Roasted Leg of Rabbit with Bacon and a Mustard Sauce."  Requires a French rabbit - check.  Good bacon - check. Whipping cream - we had double cream, which turned out to be check mate.
R. had to bone the two hind legs, and then stuffed the cavity with an herb garlic butter.  We didn't have the necessary tarragon, but used parsley and chervil instead.  Then the legs are wrapped with 5 rashers each of streaky bacon.

These roast in the oven until the bacon is "crisp and brown."  This step took lots longer than indicated by the recipe, so we are still worried about regulating its temperature.  Finally, though, they seemed done:  the boned end is sliced, and the shank with the bone placed next to the slices, like this:

Then we made the mustard cream sauce, but the double cream does NOT reduce in an attractive fashion, and we started over with some creme fraiche we also had on hand.  The end result was pretty fabulous: the rabbit was succulent and flavorsome with the herbs and butter.  To accompany, we prepared, as instructed, plain boiled potatoes, but instead of a salad, we steamed some "Simply Spinach," using Spanish spinach from the market that has been pretty good.

Wabbit #2.
Now we have the rabbit loin to transform into something yummy.  We turned the page, and Simon says "Stewed Rabbit with Balsamic Vinegar and Parsnip Purée."   This requires taking the rabbit pieces:

Then they are sprinkled with caster sugar (known as superfine sugar in the US - we have been down this road before when making the River Cafe's Nemesis Chocolate Cake).

The rabbit is then sauteed in clarified butter until a rich brown.   Next add the vinegar and "meat glaze" (this one escaped us, we used stock concentrate), and simmer for 45-60 minutes.
Meanwhile, prepare the parsnip puree.  Take some nice English parsnips like these,

peel them, cut them, up, cook in milk (that's the secret!), and then puree with some butter, mustard, and milk.  Ideally, they would be passed through a chinoise for a final stage, but we left ours at home.  Along with these, we cooked some nice Kenyan broad beans from Waitrose, and had another rabbity repast.